ty is indicated by a
shadowy hand."

"I see thou hast had custom already, Sandro," continued Nello,
addressing a solemn-looking dark-eyed youth, who made way for them on
the threshold. "And now make all clear for this signor to sit down.
And prepare the finest-scented lather, for he has a learned and a
handsome chin."

"You have a pleasant little adytum there, I see," said the stranger,
looking through a latticed screen which divided the shop from a room of
about equal size, opening into a still smaller walled enclosure, where a
few bays and laurels surrounded a stone Hermes. "I suppose your
conclave of _eruditi_ meets there?"

"There, and not less in my shop," said Nello, leading the way into the
inner room, in which were some benches, a table, with one book in
manuscript and one printed in capitals lying open upon it, a lute, a few
oil-sketches, and a model or two of hands and ancient masks. "For my
shop is a no less fitting haunt of the Muses, as you will acknowledge
when you feel the sudden illumination of understanding and the serene
vigour of inspiration that will come to you with a clear chin. Ah! you
can make that lute discourse, I perceive. I, too, have some skill that
way, though the serenata is useless when daylight discloses a visage
like mine, looking no fresher than an apple that has stood the winter.
But look at that sketch: it is a fancy of Piero di Cosimo's, a strange
freakish painter, who says he saw it by long looking at a mouldy wall."

The sketch Nello pointed to represented three masks--one a drunken
laughing Satyr, another a sorrowing Magdalen, and the third, which lay
between them, the rigid, cold face of a Stoic: the masks rested
obliquely on the lap of a little child, whose cherub features rose above
them with something of the supernal promise in the gaze which painters
had by that time learned to give to the Divine Infant.

"A symbolical picture, I see," said the young Greek, touching the lute
while he spoke, so as to bring out a slight musical murmur. "The child,
perhaps, is the Golden Age, wanting neither worship nor philosophy. And
the Golden Age can always come back as long as men are born in the form
of babies, and don't come into the world in cassock or furred mantle.
Or, the child may mean the wise philosophy of Epicurus, removed alike
from the gross, the sad, and the severe."

"Ah! everybody has his own interpretation for that picture," said Nello;
"and if you ask Piero h